I read the villagers wash their clothes which helps keep them healthy. Cleanliness...

It may be a coincidence, but since I started letting everyone do laundry as an experiment, the age of my oldest villager went up substantially in each of my four tribes. One went from 91 to 102 for example.

I always let them do laundry... I dont want them to stink do I?

I do the same but their age doesn't go up!

Does laundry help with building skill?

My builder keeps leaving the hut to go do laundry and I keep making her go back to the hut. Then, when I'm not looking for a few minutes, she goes right back to laundry.

I'm just wondering if she will earn skill to do it or if she just simply feels compelled to do the laundry.

It's aggrevating me so much! She's VERY close to Master Builder and that would be three mastered skills and would mean ELDER!!! My first one! She's also 68 years old and I'm worried that if she wastes her time doing laundry, she won't make it. I have 19 villagers (in an attempt to see how successful I can be with as few villagers as possible-also I let my first village go up in population really fast and got to 100 in no time...now I have all these "people" and a guy actually died at the age of 80 with not one hint of skill at all.)

I checked again on my builder and she's doing laundry...again!
I may just let her go and see what happens.

No! Doing laundry doesn't help with building skill!
But exercising helps for buiding skills

Unless you're very committed to watching your villagers all the time, it can be very helpful to quit the game and only check on them every so often. They don't do laundry or otherwise "goof off" when the game is off. Since your villager is so old, you might try setting the game speed to 1/2 speed or normal speed and only check on her every 30 minutes or so (to check her health and progress as a builder).